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In today’s issue of Truthdig.com, columnist Robert Scheer asks “How do you justify criminally charging a government contractor for revealing an alarming truth that the public has every right to know?”

Scheer claims, “That is the contradiction raised by President Obama now that he has, in effect, acknowledged that Edward Snowden was an indispensable whistle-blower who significantly raised public awareness about a government threat to our freedom.”

Scheer says it’s unfortunate the president didn’t have the grace and courage to concede that precise point and remains committed to imprisoning Snowden instead of thanking him for serving the public interest. He reckons WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange nailed it when he (Assange) said, “Today, the president of the United States validated Edward Snowden’s role as a whistleblower by announcing plans to reform America’s global surveillance program”.

Edward SnowdenJulian Assange

Here’s some of the more telling excerpts from Sheer’s Truthdig.com article:

While boasting, “I called for a review of our surveillance programs,” Obama avoided the obvious fact that this review was compelled not by a sudden burst of respect for the safeguards demanded by our Constitution but rather Snowden’s action in making the public cognizant of the astounding breadth and depth of the National Security Agency’s spying program.

Once again, Obama managed to blame not those responsible for government malfeasance, himself included, but instead the rare insiders driven to do their duty to inform the American people. “Unfortunately, rather than an orderly and lawful process to debate these issues and come up with appropriate reforms, repeated leaks of classified information have initiated the debate in a very passionate but not always fully informed way,” he said.

How disingenuous, to put it mildly. Without the leaks, there would be no reforms. We, the voters, couldn’t initiate a debate about the wisdom of this extensive spying because the government officials who authorized it, from the president on down, kept us in the dark.

Regardless of the rights and wrongs of Snowden’s actions, or Assange’s for that matter, Scheer does have a point when he asks how Snowden can be condemned for revealing information “the public has every right to know”. But, hey, maybe I’m missing something here?

We’d like to know what you think. Drop a line or leave a message on our blog.

It is a tricky one this ‘freedom of speech vs national security issue’ and I know there’s no simple answer. We raise some of these very issues in our conspiracy thriller series The Orphan Trilogy (The Ninth Orphan / The Orphan Factory / The Orphan Uprising).

Here’s some relevant quotes from The Orphan Trilogy:

* “Factual reporting is all too often propaganda designed to provoke certain reactions from the masses.”